Lottie Moon

Life

Her full name was Charlotte Digges Moon; "Lottie" was a nickname. She was born on December 12, 1840, at Viewmont, a plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia. Her family was wealthy, and her parents were devout Baptists. As a child she was resistant to religious faith, but she was converted while in college and was baptized at First Baptist Church of Charlottesville. Some sources date her conversion to December 1858, others to the spring of 1859. She studied at the Albemarle Female Institute and received a master's degree in 1861; she is counted among the first women in the American South to earn a master's degree. She later taught school in Kentucky, Georgia, and elsewhere.

In 1873, after hearing a sermon on the text "Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields" (John 4:35), she volunteered for missionary service. On July 7 of that year, the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (now the International Mission Board) appointed her as a missionary to China. She went to Dengzhou in Shandong Province, where her younger sister Edmonia, who had been sent out a year earlier, was serving. In her final years, when famine struck, she gave away what she had and became severely weakened. While returning to the United States with the nurse Cynthia Miller, she died on Christmas Eve 1912 aboard a ship anchored in the harbor of Kobe, Japan. She never married.

Ministry and Accomplishments

At first she taught in a mission school, but she was more drawn to direct evangelism, traveling through rural villages to share the gospel with women. At the time, missionary work was carried out mainly by married male missionaries. Convinced that only women missionaries could reach Chinese women, Lottie Moon wrote persistently to request broader opportunities for ministry for women missionaries. In 1885 she moved alone to Pingdu in the interior. In 1891 a church and a school were established in the village of Sha-ling, and by around 1898 there were four churches in the Pingdu area. Pingdu is regarded as the region where Southern Baptists gained the largest number of converts in China.

She wrote letters to Baptist women in the American South, appealing for missionary personnel and financial support. A letter she wrote on September 15, 1887, was published in a missions magazine that December. The following year, in 1888, the newly organized Woman's Missionary Union (WMU) raised $3,315 in its first Christmas offering, and the funds were used to send three additional missionaries. The offering continued annually, and in 1918 it was named the "Lottie Moon Christmas Offering" in her honor. The International Mission Board states that the entire offering is used to support missionaries, and in March 2021 it announced that cumulative giving had surpassed five billion dollars.

Influence on the Korean Church

In Korea she is presented, mainly in Baptist circles, as an example of sacrificial missionary service. The Baptist News, the denominational newspaper of the Korea Baptist Convention, published a column describing the origins of the Lottie Moon offering. According to the same column, the denomination's foreign mission board has also run advertisements bearing her name in the paper. In 2010 Youth With A Mission published a Korean translation of her biography. Released as part of a series on missionary figures, the book is widely read across denominational lines.

Assessment

Within the Southern Baptist Convention, Lottie Moon is honored as a symbol of the sacrificial missionary spirit. A biography written by Una Roberts Lawrence in 1927 made her story widely known. The account that she died of starvation after going hungry to feed the Chinese people originated in the testimony of Miller, the nurse who was with her at the end. Some sources, however, regard this account as a myth that took hold through an article published in 1913. In addition, because the offering bears the name of a woman who advocated expanded ministry for women, some church members who disagree with the Southern Baptist Convention's direction in restricting women's pastoral ministry decline to participate in the offering (see women's ordination). The Virginia church she attended in her childhood called a woman as its pastor in 2012.